Last December, the Big Ten began an expansion pursuit that came close to triggering a revolution
in collegiate conference alignment.

In June, when the Big Ten added football power Nebraska as its 12th member, it kept the door
open to adding more schools while it continued to study expansion.

The conference now has closed that door.

The Big Ten's Council of Presidents/Chancellors had its winter meeting in suburban Chicago
yesterday and announced that the expansion process "has reached its natural conclusion" and won't
engage in pursuing additional expansion "for the foreseeable future."

The league said it will concentrate on integrating Nebraska into the Big Ten. The Cornhuskers
will begin competing in the Big Ten starting with the 2011-12 school year.

"The most important issue right now is assimilating Nebraska into the conference," Ohio State
president E. Gordon Gee told
The Dispatch. "We're trying to do that in a year. We took three years to do that with Penn
State. So we want to concentrate on that right now - and Nebraska was really an inspired choice, I
might add."

Yesterday's announcement was a quiet ending to a story that quickly swelled when the league
announced last Dec. 15 that it would contemplate expansion.

Commissioner Jim Delany had said repeatedly that he knew the conference's decision to pursue
expansion would be big news, and the ripples from it threatened to transform college sports.

The Big 12 nearly imploded. The Big East feared it might, as well, as speculation mounted that
the Big Ten might entice schools to leave to form a 14- or even 16-team conference. If that
happened, other conferences might fight among themselves for members to form mega-conferences of
their own.

But in the end, Nebraska was the only school the Big Ten invited to join. The Big 12 survived,
although it also lost Colorado to the Pac-10. The Big East ended up keeping all of its members and
last week added Texas Christian.

"We certainly looked at the models people would talk about publicly - 12 (teams), 14, 16," Ohio
State athletic director Gene Smith said. "We felt very comfortable that this is our sweet spot
(adding only Nebraska)."

The Big Ten did leave the door open to expansion down the road.

"If the climate changes or issues come up, we could revisit it at some point," Gee said. "But
right now we want to concentrate on becoming a 12-team Big Ten."

The addition of Nebraska allowed the Big Ten to split into two football divisions and have a
championship game starting in 2011.